Alvaro Uribe's furniture designs

Something you'll notice about Brooklyn is the brownstones and their attendant stoop-manning; so it's no surprise that a furniture piece incorporating the motif was devised by a Brooklyn resident. Alvaro Uribe's New York City Stoop Bench is a bench for two that flips over to recreate the first four steps, making the perfect shoot-the-breeze sitting surface.

You've probably seen Clay Furniture by Marten Baas, Timeless Objects by Boym Studio, and maybe also the concoctions from hot wax and sticks by Jerszy Seymour's Coalition of Amateurs. Here's another project that shares that pre-industrial, primitive sensibility: Silvas Capitalis, or "Forest Head," was conceived of and built by SimpArch...

Last year the Department of Energy sponsored a design competition called Next Generation Luminaires, intended to "demonstrate the diversity of solid-state lighting products ready for specification in the commercial sector." The winners have just been announced, and since there are a ton--nearly 50--we'll just show you the four best-in-class winners:Task...

Frankfurt-based product company Ivorilla's Jerrycan-based luggage is bound to stick out on the carousel. The GasCase comes in both flip-top Zippo-lighter style and regular cabinet-door variants, and no, that's not shiny plastic--they're made out of steel, mounted on heavy-duty trolley wheels.

We often blog about auto design and furniture design because--and I don't have the official stats on this, but in my perception--auto design is the largest, most corporate and most industrial of the industrial design offshoots and furniture design is the sexiest. Sadly, the two fields rarely see any project...